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As someone who was the manager for an email/online support team, I've long felt that there's not enough oversight in Blizz's support department.
It's kind of obvious that they're using an automated CRM system. That's not at all unusual, nor is it a bad thing. The way they work is that incoming email/tickets are processed through various sets of rules. These can range from very basic things such as what email address a message was sent to, to very complex combinations of key words, phrases, and other attributes. Based upon the rules, the message is eventually routed to a particular service queue. The various support personnel will be members of one or more queues. When they log in, they'll only see messages from those queues. That way, a ticket about a hacked account is seen by someone who is trained in handling those. One staff member can, of course, be in multiple queues.
Another thing the rules will do is try to identify what the gist of the ticket is. Again, it's looking at key words and phrases. Based upon what it finds, the system will suggest a script for responding to the ticket. Unfortunately, the system doesn't always pick the right answer. I was there from the inception of the one I managed and wrote hundreds of rules for it along with . No matter how many you write, there will always be some incorrect suggestions from the system. A customer could write in that they were receiving their issue late every month (I worked for a company that published health and investing newsletters and sold related products) and that if it kept up they would cancel their subscription. Depending upon how they worded their message, the system might think it was a cancellation request and suggest the support team member reply with an email saying they'd canceled the customer's sub.
Now what is *supposed* to happen is that a support team member will open a message, read it, do whatever fix/action is needed, then check to make sure the suggested response is appropriate. They'll then 'customize' the response (by adding a customer name and/or other pertinent info) and send the reply. At regular intervals, someone in a supervisory position will randomly select tickets and review them for quality control. That person makes sure whoever handled the ticket did what was needed and responded properly. I spent a good chunk of time every week doing that. It's boring and tedious, but necessary.
What appears to happen with Blizz is that some of the GM's are just opening the tickets and hitting 'send' on the suggested response, whether it's appropriate or not. They may or may not actually address the issue in the ticket as well. Either there is not enough random review of tickets or there's none at all. Odds are it's the former. I'd bet that there aren't enough people doing the reviewing so a lot of 'bad' responses slip by. The GM's almost certainly notice this, so some of them just start blowing off tickets and hitting 'send' when things are particularly busy or when they're behind. Support reps will have a set number of tickets they should be able to process in a day. Obviously this isn't a hard number since some tickets take longer than others. My staff knew to let me know if they had some particularly troublesome one that took a lot of time so I could take it into account.
Since it costs money to run a support department and more reps equals more cost, Blizz appears to be running theirs as lean as they can. Unfortunately, keeping things too lean means a good bit of slacking off by the various reps. This is manifested by tickets closed with an inappropriate response or without attempting to contact the player. I know I've submitted tickets in the past and seen an email appear in my inbox a bit later saying I couldn't be contacted in game, even though at the time I'd been just flying around farming herbs for raiding flasks and would've seen any whispers from a GM.
We do need to keep in mind, however, that (at least in my experience) *most* tickets are handled properly. The outcome may not be what we want, but they are handled and appropriate responses sent. Shoot, I've had some fun little interactions with GM's who were responding to tickets in-game. It's just the bad responses that tend to stick with us.
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Jeeze, what the heck is wrong with people?
